Archive for the ‘espn’ tag

Last weekend, we worked with ESPN to track tweets about the 2012 Winter X Games in Aspen, Colorado, held January 26 through January 29, 2012. It was a big event, accumulating 171,373 tweets over the four days of competition!

During last summer’s X Games, we tracked 188K tweets from 97K contributors, for an overall reach of 37.7 million. This year’s Winter X Games generated 171K tweets from 100K contributors and an overall reach of 37.9 million. Two days into these games, here were the stats:

Sunday, January 29, was a big day for the games, featuring the final competitions for two fan favorites – the Snowmobile Best Trick and Men’s Snowboard Superpipe. Athletes like Heath Frisby, Shaun White, and Justin Hoyer generated a lot of Twitter buzz, and Heath’s first-ever snowmobile front flip resulted in the highest tweet spike of the entire games (1,634 tweets per minute).

By the end of the Winter X Games, the most retweeted tweet was from @espn and referred to snowboarder Shaun White’s perfect score in the Snowboard Superpipe Final. It got 1,428 retweets and generated 3.3 million impressions.

We worked with ESPN to measure Twitter’s reaction to this year’s X Games 17, held in Los Angeles, California from July 28-31, 2011. Hundreds of athletes from 17 countries competed in sports like skateboarding, motocross, BMX and rally car racing. And over the four days of the X Games, 97,200 people tweeted 188,813 times, generating an impressive reach of 37.7 million*.

How’d they do it?

“Our goal going in was to make the event as social as possible,” says Mick Kelleher, Associate Manager of Multimedia Content Strategy for the X Games. This was a big, integrated effort combining all the ESPN teams responsible for producing the X Games. The TV production team showed the #xgames hashtag frequently during the telecast, included athlete Twitter accounts in on-screen bios as well as showing athlete tweets on air. The social team used the @XGames Twitter account to keep their followers on Twitter up to date on all the events. The social integration even went all the way to the event site, where they encouraged fans attending the Games to tweet.

The results

ESPN used TweetReach Pro Trackers to comprehensively track and analyze all mentions of the X Games on Twitter for the week leading up to the event and during the event itself. As you can see below, the strong results of their social strategy speak for themselves.

The most retweeted tweet about the games was from @LilTunechi, which received 905 retweets and generated more than 3 million impressions.

One of the biggest stories to come out of this year’s X Games concerned Travis Pastrana, who broke his ankle and leg in the Moto X Best Trick competition on Thursday, but later competed – and placed fourth – in the RallyCross final on Sunday.

We analyzed tweets about several events in detail, including Moto X Best Trick, Skateboarding Big Air, BMX Park Freestyle, Rally Car Racing, Skateboard Street, and RallyCross. At one point during the RallyCross final, viewers noticed something strange; 200 people tweeted that they spotted The Stig from Top Gear walk behind Brian Deegan during an interview. Here are the big moments from one our favorite X Games 17 days. Click the image for the full size version.

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TweetReach is brought to you by Union Metrics. We focus on delivering powerful social analytics that enable marketers to measure and improve their social media campaigns. We provide analytics across Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.

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